Google adds Shopping Campaigns to its PLA campaign roster.

Google’s shopping platform uses PLA’s (Product listing ads) to manage and advertise various items on the platform, Google is now hoping to expand on this and include a new type of campaign called “Shopping campaign”.

The new campaign type provides a new way to “streamline how you manage and bid on your products, report on your performance, and find opportunities to grow your traffic from Google.”

Essentially another set of analytic’s and demographic analysis, that’s aimed at viewing your stocks performance against your Google based customers and seeing if there are any patterns that you can use to better supply your customers with your goods or simply to better understand what it is your customers are looking for most when arriving at your site and stock.

The dubbed “Key benefits”;

1. Retail-centric way to manage your products

Custom labels are a new feature introduced with this new campaign type. These labels play a pivotal role in managing your stock on a per-product basis instead of relying on wider tags for entire product groups or brands.

2. Advanced reporting to measure product performance

Once you have this new campaign set firmly in your mind as a new way to manage and review all your products on Google, then it is time to use the new custom label as a means of checking your stock in ways that are meaningful to you and your customers.

For instance, you could label some of your shoes into “outdoor” or “running” shoes. Allowing you to see those customers

3. Competitive data to size your opportunity

Ultimately, this new campaign type, the new custom labels, demographics and analysis you’ll be able to make use of, give you an even deeper insight into the competitive landscape. This data is aggregated and the averages used so all the data is anonymous.

This new campaign type will only be available to a limited set of advertisers as it goes through its final phases of testing, but should roll out gradually in the U.S with the rest of world getting access by early 2014.